Senator North

G >> Gertrude Atherton >> Senator North

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"This has been too much for you, miss, I reckon," he said. "I'll get
you downstairs. Keep close behind me."

He forced a way through the crowd to the elevator. To attempt to part
the compact mass on the staircase would invite disaster. The elevator
boy had deserted his post that he might hear the news the sooner, but
the policeman pushed Betty into the car, and manipulated the ropes
himself. On the lower floor was another dense crowd; but he got her to
the East door after rescuing her twice, called her carriage and
returned to his post, well pleased with his bill.

For many moments Betty, bruised from elbows, breathless from her
passage through that crush in the stagnant air, could not think
connectedly. She vaguely recalled Mrs. Mudd's large face and black
silk dress in the Diplomats' Gallery, which even a Cabinet minister
might not enter without a permit from a member of the Corps. Doubtless
the doorkeepers had been flung to and fro more than once to-night,
like little skiffs in an angry sea. She wondered how she had had
sufficient presence of mind to fee the policeman, and hoped she had
not given him silver instead of the large bill which had seemed to
spring to her fingers at the end of that frightful journey.

She leaned out of the open window, wishing it were winter, that the
blood might be driven from her head; but there was only the slight
chill of a delicious April morning in the air, and the young leaves
fluttered gently in the trees. In the afternoon hundreds of boys had
sold violets in the streets, and the perfume lingered, floating above
the heavier scent of the magnolias in the parks. Betty's weary mind
pictured Washington as it would be a few weeks hence, a great forest
of brilliant living green amidst which one had almost to look for the
houses and the heroes in the squares. Every street was an avenue whose
tall trees seemed to cut the sky into blue banners--the word started
the rearrangement of her scattered senses; in a few weeks the dust
would be flying up to the green from thousands of marching feet.

She burst into tears, and they gave her some relief. The carriage
stopped at the house a moment later, and she went directly to her
boudoir. She took off her hat and pulled down her hair, rubbing her
fingers against her burning head. Senator North took possession of her
mind at once. The Senate was no longer a unit to her excited
imagination; it seemed to dissolve away and leave one figure standing
there beaten and alone.

She forgot the passionate efforts of other Senators in behalf of
peace; to her the fine conservative strength of the Senate was
personified in one man. And if there were others as pure and unselfish
in their ideals, his at least was the master intellect.

She wondered if he remembered in this hour of bitter defeat that she
had promised to come to this room and give him what she could of
herself. That was weeks and weeks ago, and she had not repeated her
intention, as she should have done. But he loved her, and was not
likely to forget anything she said to him. Or would he care if he did
remember? Must not personal matters seem of small account to-night? Or
was he too weary to care for anything but sleep? Perhaps he had flung
himself down on a sofa in the cloak-room, or in his Committee Room,
and forgotten the national disaster while she watched.

She had been walking rapidly up and down the room. Her thoughts were
not yet coherent, and instinct prompted her to get the blood out of
her head if she could. A vague sense of danger possessed her, but she
was not capable of defining it. Suddenly she stopped and held her
breath. She had become aware of a recurring footstep on the sidewalk.
Her window abutted some thirty feet away. She craned her head forward,
listening so intently that the blood pounded in her ears. She expected
to hear the gate open, the footsteps to grow softer on the path. But
they continued to pace the stone flags of the sidewalk.

She opened her door, ran down the hall and into the parlor. Without an
instant's hesitation she flung open a window and leaned out. The light
from the street lamp fell full upon her. He could not fail to see her
were he there. But he was not. The man pacing up and down before the
house was the night watchman.

Betty closed the window hurriedly and stumbled back into the dark
room. The disappointment and reaction were intolerable. She felt the
same blind rage with Circumstance which had attacked her the night he
had kissed and left her. In such crises conventions are non-existent;
she might have been primeval woman for all she recalled in that hour
of the teachings of the centuries. Had he been there, she would have
called him in. He was hers, whatever stood between them, and she alone
had the right to console him.

Her mind turned suddenly to his house. He was there, of course; it was
absurd to imagine that his cool deliberation would ever forsake him.
The moment the Senate adjourned he would have put on his hat, walked
down to the East door, called a cab and gone home. And he was in his
library. Why she felt so positive that he was there and not in bed she
could not have told, but she saw the light in the long wing. She put
her hands to her face suddenly, and moved to the door. She stumbled
over a chair, and then noticed the intense darkness of the room. But
beyond she saw distinctly the big red brick house of Senator North,
with the light burning in the wing. Was she going to him? She wondered
vaguely, for her will seemed to be at the bottom of a pile of
struggling thoughts and to have nothing to say in the matter. Surely
she must. He was a man who stood alone and scorned sympathy or help,
but he would be glad of hers because it was hers; there was no
possible doubt of that. And in spite of his record he must for the
hour feel a bitter and absolute failure.

A pebble would bring him to the window. He would come out, and come
back here with her. She opened her arms suddenly. The room was so dark
she almost could fancy him beside her. Would that he were!

She had no adequate conception of a morrow. The future was drab and
formless. His trouble drew her like a magnet. She trembled at the mere
thought of being able to make him forget.

And he? If he came out and saw her standing there, he would be more
than a man if he resisted the impulse to return with her here and take
her in his arms. And he too must be in a state of mind in which to-day
dwarfed and blotted out to-morrow.

For the moment she stood motionless, almost breathless, realizing so
vividly the procession of bitter and apprehensive thoughts in the mind
which for so long had possessed and controlled hers that she forgot
her intention, even her desire to go to him. It was this moment of
insight and abstraction from self that saved her. Her own mind seemed
to awake suddenly.

It was as if her thinking faculty had descended to her heart during
the last hours and been made dizzy and dull by the wild hot whirl of
emotions there. It climbed suddenly to where it belonged, and set the
rested machinery of her brain to work.

Doubtless his impulse had been to come to her, to the room where he
knew she was alone and would receive him if he demanded admittance. He
had put the temptation aside, as he had put aside many others; and it
had been in her mind, was in her mind still, to make the temptation
irresistible. And if he felt a failure to-night, she had it in her
power to wreck his life utterly.

It was more than possible that in the remaining years of his vigour
dwelt his tardy opportunities for historical fame. The great Republic
had sailed out of her summer sea into foreign waters, stormy,
unfriendly, bristling with unimaginable dangers. Once more she would
need great statesmen, not merely able legislators, and there could be
no doubt in the mind of any student of the Senate that she would
discover them swiftly. North was the greatest of these; and the record
of his future, brilliant, glorious perhaps, seemed to unroll itself
suddenly in the dark room.

Betty drew a long hard breath. Her cheeks were cool at last, and she
wondered if her heart were dead, it felt so cold. What mad impulse
nearly had driven her to him to-night, independently of her will;
which had slept, worn out, like other faculties, by a day of hunger,
excitement, fatigue, and physical pain? The impulse had risen
unhindered and uncriticised from her heart, and if it had risen once
it could rise again. The days to come would be full of excitement.
She fancied that she already heard the roar of cannon, the beating of
drums, the sobs of women. And below the racket and its sad
accompaniment was always the low indignant mutter of a triumphant
people at those who had dared to set themselves above the popular
clamour and ask for sanity. The intolerable longing that had become
her constant companion would be fed by every device of unpropitious
Circumstance. Again and again she would experience this impulse to go
to him, and some night the blood would not recede from her brain in
time.

She groped her way out of the dark parlor and down the hall, grateful
for an excuse to walk slowly. Her boudoir was brilliant, and the
struggle of the last few moments seemed the more terrible and
significant by contrast with the dainty luxurious room. She wondered
if she ever should dare to enter the parlor again, and if it always
would not look dark to her.

She sat down at her desk and wrote a letter. It ran:--
Dear Mr. Burleigh,--I will marry you if you still wish it. Will you
dine with us to-night?

Betty Madison.

She was too tired for emotion, but she knew what would come later.
Nevertheless, she went to the front door and asked the watchman to
post the letter. Then she went to bed.

XV

The Senate adjourned a few moments after Betty left the gallery. There
was little conversation in the cloak-room. The Senators were very
tired, and it surely was a brain of bubbles that could indulge in
comment upon the climax of the great finished chapter of the old
Republic.

North put on his hat and overcoat at once and left the Capitol. After
the close confinement in heated and vitiated air for sixteen hours,
the thought of a cab was intolerable: he shook his head at the old
darky who owned him and whom he never had been able to dodge during
his twenty years' service in Washington, plunged his hands into his
overcoat pockets, and strode off with an air of aggressive
determination which amused him as a fitting anti-climax. The darky
grinned and drove home without looking for another fare. His Senator
not only had paid him by the month for several years, but had
supported his family for the last ten.

North inhaled the pure cool air, the delicious perfume of violet and
magnolia, as Betty had done. Once he paused and looked up at the
wooded heights surrounding the city, then down at the Potomac and the
great expanse of roofs and leaves. The Washington Monument, the
purest, coldest, most impersonal monument on earth, looked as gray as
the sky, but its outlines were as sharp as at noonday. North often
watched it from the window of his Committee Room; he had seen it rosy
with the mists of sunset, as dark as granite under stormy skies, as
waxen as death. Normally, it was white and pure and inspiring, never
companionable, but helpful in its cold and lofty beauty.

"It _is_ a monument," he thought, to-night, "and to more than
Washington."

He turned into Massachusetts Avenue and strolled along, in no hurry to
find himself between walls again. He was not conscious of physical
fatigue, and experienced no longing for bed, but his brain was tired
and he enjoyed the absence of enforced companionship and continued
alertness, the cool air, the quiet morning in her last sleep.

Betty, like all brilliant women who love passionately, had over-
imagined, in her solitude and excitement. It is true that North had
felt the bitterness of defeat, that his mind had dwelt upon the
miserable and blasting thought that after years of unquestioned
statesmanship and leadership, of hard work and unremitting devotion,
his will had had no weight against hysteria and delirium. But both
bitterness and the sense of failure had been dismissed in the moment
when he had, once for all, accepted the situation; and that had been
several days before. Since then, he had shoved aside the past, and had
given his undivided thought to the present and the future. He had
uttered his "aye" almost indifferently; it had been given to the
President days since.

Nevertheless, his brain, tired as it was, did not wander from the
great climax in his country's history. To that country at large this
climax meant simply a brief and arrogant chastisement of a cruel
little nation; the generals would have been quite justified in sending
their dress clothes and golf sticks on to Havana; but North knew that
this officious "police duty" was the noisy prologue to a new United
States, possibly to the birth of a new Constitution.

"Is this the grand finale of the people's rule?" he thought. "They
have screamed for the moon as they never screamed before, and this
time they have got it fairly between their teeth. Well, it is a dead
old planet; will its decay vitiate their own blood and leave them the
half-willing prey of a Circumstance they do not dream of now? Dewey
will take the Philippines, of course. He would be an inefficient fool
if he did not, and he is the reverse. The Spanish in Cuba will crumble
almost before the world realizes that the war has begun. The United
States will find itself sitting open-mouthed with two huge prizes in
its lap. It may, in a fit of virtue which would convulse history, give
them back, present them, with much good advice and more rhetoric, to
their rightful owners. And it may not. These prizes are crusted with
gold; and the stars and stripes will look so well in the breeze above
that the pride of patriotism may decide they must remain there. And if
it does--if it does... The extremists in the Senate will grow twenty
years in one... With the bit between their teeth and the arrogance
of triumph in their blood--"

He found himself in front of his own house. He turned slowly and
looked intently for a moment toward I Street. His face softened, then
he jerked out his latchkey, let himself in and went directly to the
library. He still had no desire for bed, and threw himself into an
easy-chair before the andirons. But it was the first time in several
days that he had sat in a luxurious chair, and the room was full of
soft warmth. He fell asleep, and although he seemed to awaken
immediately, he could only conclude, when the experience which
followed was over, that he had been dreaming.

He suddenly became aware that a chair beside him was occupied, and he
wheeled about sharply. His sense of companionship was justified; a man
sat there. North stared at him, more puzzled than surprised,
endeavouring to fit the familiar face to some name on his long list of
acquaintances, and wondering who in Washington could have given a
fancy-dress ball that night. His visitor wore his hair in a queue and
powdered, a stock of soft lawn, and a dress-coat of plum-coloured
cloth cut as in the days of the founders of the Republic.

Although it was some moments before North recognized his visitor, his
resentment at this unseasonable intrusion passed quickly; the
personality in the chair was so charming, so magnetic, so genial. He
was a young man, between thirty and forty, with a long nose, a mobile
mouth, dark gray-blue eyes full of fire and humour, and a massive
head. It was a face of extraordinary power and intellect, but lit up
by a spirit so audacious and impulsive and triumphant that it was
like a leaping flame of dazzling brilliancy in some forbidding
fortress. He was smiling with a delighted expression of good
fellowship; but North experienced a profound conviction that the man
was weighing and analyzing him, that he would weigh and analyze
everybody with whom he came in contact, and make few mistakes.

"Who the deuce can he be?" he thought, "and why doesn't he speak?" And
then it occurred to him that he had not spoken, himself. He was about
to inquire with somewhat perfunctory courtesy in what manner he could
serve his visitor, when his glance fell on the man's hands. He sat
erect with a slight exclamation and experienced a stiffening at the
roots of his hair. The hands under the lace ruffles were the most
beautiful that ever had been given to a man, even to as small a man as
this. They were white and strong and delicate, with pointed fingers
wide apart, and filbert nails. North knew them well, for they were the
hands of the man whom he admired above all men in the history of his
country. But until to-night he had seen them on canvas only, in the
Treasury Department of the United States. His feeling of terror
passed, and he sat forward eagerly.

"The little lion," he said caressingly, for the man before him might
have been his son, although he had been in his tomb with a bullet in
his heart for nearly a century. But he looked so young, so restless,
so indomitable, that the years slipped out of the century, and
Hamilton once more was the most brilliant ornament of a country which
had never ceased to need him.

"Yes," he said brightly, "here I am, sir, and you see me at last. This
is that one moment in the lifetime of the few when the spirit burns
through the flesh and recognizes another spirit who has lost that dear
and necessary medium. I have been with you a great deal in your life,
but you never have been able to see me until to-night." He gave his
head an impatient toss. "How I have wished I were alive during the
last three or four months!" he exclaimed. "Not that I could have
accomplished what you could not, sir, but it would have been such a
satisfaction to have been able to make the effort, and then, when I
failed, to tell democracy what I thought of it."

North smiled. All sense of the supernatural had left him. His soul and
Hamilton's were face to face; that was the one glorified fact. "I have
been tempted several times lately to wish that we had your
aristocratic republic," he said, "and that I were the head and centre
of it. I have felt a strong desire to wring the neck of that many-
headed nuisance called 'the people,' and proceed as if it were where
the God of nations intended those incapable of governing should
be and remain without protest."

"Oh, yes, you are an aristocrat. That is the reason I have enjoyed the
society of your mind all these years. You were so like me in many ways
when you were my age, and since then I seem to have grown older with
you. I died so young. But in you, in the last twenty years, I seem to
have lived on. You have built an iron wall all round those terrible
fires of your youth, and roofed it over. It is only now and then that
a panel melts and the flame leaps out; and the panel is so quickly
replaced! I too should have conquered myself like that and made fewer
and fewer mistakes."

"God knows what I might not have been able to do for my country. I
have been mad to leap into the arena often enough."

"You are not dead. No man is, whose inspiration lives on. More than
one of us would be of shorter stature and shorter gait if we never had
had your accomplishment to ponder over. And as to what the nation
would have been without you--"

"Yes!" cried Hamilton. "Yes! How can any man of ability submit to
death without protest, shrug his shoulders cynically, and say that no
man's disappearance causes more than a whirl of bubbles on the
surface, that the world goes on its old gait undisturbed, and does as
well with the new as the old? Look at Great Britain. She hasn't a
single great man in all her eleven million square miles to lead her.
That is answer enough to a theory which some men are sincere enough in
believing. This country always has needed great leaders, and sometimes
she has had them and sometimes not. The time is coming when she will
need them as she has not done since the days when three or four of us
set her on her feet."

North stood up suddenly and looked down on Hamilton. "What are we
coming to?" he asked abruptly. "Monarchy?"

The guest tapped the toe of his little slipper with the tips of his
beautiful fingers. He laughed gayly. "I can see only a little farther
ahead than your own far-penetrating brain, sir. What do you think?"

"As I walked home tonight, the situation possessed my mind, which by
some process of its own seemed to develop link after link in coming
events. It seemed to me that I saw a thoroughly disorganized people,
unthinkingly but ruthlessly thrusting aside all ideals, and--
consequently--in time--ready for anything."

Hamilton nodded, "If they had begun with my ideal, they would have
remained there. Now they will leap far behind that--when there is a
strong enough man down there in the White House. Certain radical
changes, departures from their traditions and those of their fathers,
will school them for greater changes still. In some great critical
moment when a dictator seems necessary they will shrug their shoulders
and say, 'Why not?'"

"I believe you are right, but I doubt if it comes in my time."

Hamilton shook his head. "Every state in Europe has its upper lip
curled back above its teeth, and who knows, when the leashes snap,
what our fate will be, now that we have practically abandoned our
policy of non-interference in the affairs of the Eastern Hemisphere?
If all Europe is at somebody's throat in the next five years, we shall
not escape; be sure of that. Then will be the great man's opportunity.
You always have despised the office of President. Work for it from
this day. The reaction from this madness will help you. Democrats as
well as Republicans will turn to you as the one man worthy of the
confidence of the entire country."

"Not if they guessed that I meditated treason, sir. Nor should I. I
agree with you that your ideal was the best, but there is nothing for
me to do but to make the best of the one I've inherited. If I am
aristocratic in my preferences, I am also a pretty thoroughgoing
American."

"Yes, yes, I know, sir. You never will meditate what, if premeditated,
would be treason. But when the great moment comes, when your
patriotism and your statesmanship force you to admit that if the
country is to be saved it must be rescued from the people, and that
you alone can rescue it, then you will tear the Constitution down its
middle. This country is past amendments. It must begin over again. And
the whole great change must come from one man. The people never could
be got to vote for an aristocratic republic. They must be stunned into
accepting a monarchy. After the monarchy, then the real, the great
Republic."

The two men looked long into each other's eyes. Then North said,--

"I repeat that I never should work nor scheme for the position that
such a change might bring me. Nevertheless, believing, as I do, that
we are on the threshold of a new and entirely different era in this
country, if the time should come when I felt that I, as its most
highly trained servant, could best serve the United States by taking
her destinies entirely into my own hands, I should do so without an
instant's hesitation. I have done all I could to preserve the old
order for them, and they have called me traitor and gone their own
way. Now let them take the consequences."

Hamilton set his mobile lips in a hard line. His eyes looked like
steel. "Yes," he said harshly, "let them take the consequences. They
had their day, they have gone mad with democracy, let them now die of
their own poison. The greatest Republic the world ever will have known
is only in the ante-room of its real history." He stood up suddenly
and held out his hand. "Good-bye, sir," he said. "We may or may not
meet again before you too are forced to abandon your work. But I often
shall be close to you, and I believe, I firmly believe, that you will
do exactly as I should do if I stood on solid ground to-day."

North took the exquisite hand that had written the greatest state
papers of the century, and looked wonderingly at its white beauty. It
suddenly gave him the grip of an iron vise. North returned the
pressure. Then the strong hand melted from his, and he stood alone.

Exactly in what the transition from sleep to waking consisted, North
was not able to define. There was a brief sense of change, including a
lifting of heavy eyelids. Technically he awoke. But he was standing on
the hearthrug. And his right hand ached.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"What difference does it make whether he appeared to my waking eyes or
passed through my sleeping brain and sat down with my soul?"

He plunged his hands into his pockets and stood thinking for many
minutes. He said, half aloud, finally,--

"Not in my time, perhaps. But it will come, it will come."

XVI

When Betty awoke at four o'clock in the afternoon, she discovered with
some surprise that she had slept soundly for eleven hours. Her head
was a trifle heavy, but after her bath she felt so fresh again that
the previous day and night seemed like a very long and very ugly
dream. She reflected that if she had not written to Burleigh before
she went to bed she certainly should do so now. He still seemed the
one safeguard for the future; she had convinced herself that with her
capacity for violent emotion and nervous exaltation, her head was not
to be trusted.

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